by J. F. Penn
Now Lilith had three rattlesnakes winding around her, two in one hand and one in the other. She raised her arms high, standing still and silent while the congregation whirled and stamped around her. Tambourines rattled. The faithful cried out to their God. She closed her eyes and felt the power of the serpent running through her, like a current into the ground beneath. Its ancient power rising and channeling through her blood.
Then she felt it. A whisper like that in her dreams.
The heartbeat of the Serpent of Serpents.
He was coming.
2
London, England.
"Morgan, Jake. Wait." The deep voice boomed through the corridor of the ARKANE headquarters, deep under Trafalgar Square in central London.
Dr Morgan Sierra turned to see Director Marietti at the entrance to one of the labs. He held a cane and rested against the door frame. His body was still weak from the injuries he had sustained in India during the hunt for the Brahmastra weapon, but his eyes were steel hard. Morgan knew that he would not back down in the face of danger, whether inside ARKANE or out in the world. She was part of that fight now and even though they had just returned from a mission, she was ready for whatever came next.
Jake went to Marietti and embraced his mentor, then stepped back, aware that he might have overstepped the mark. But Marietti smiled.
"It's good to see you back safely." He looked at Morgan. "Both of you."
Marietti's eyes met hers. They had almost come to blows over her actions in India, when she had made a decision against his orders, but it seemed that was now forgotten. His words were as close to an apology as she was likely to get.
And that was OK.
"I know you've just returned," Marietti continued, "but there's something we need to work on urgently. Something that may threaten us all."
He beckoned them into the lab. Morgan followed Jake into the room, one of the sterile environments used for examining ancient artifacts, down in the hidden chambers that few knew about. The public-facing side of the Arcane Religious Knowledge And Numinous Experience Institute consisted of funding academic discourse on religious topics, but ARKANE was actually a secret agency investigating supernatural mysteries around the world. There were secrets down in the vault below that Morgan had almost died to protect and many more left to uncover.
Like the artifact Marietti pointed at now.
Spotlights illuminated a black marble tablet mounted on its side. Even with the bright lights in the room, the temperature felt cooler around the slab, as if the stone sucked in the light and warmth around it.
Morgan shivered a little as she bent to look at the tablet more closely. It was roughly cut around the edges, as if excavated in a hurry and one end was missing. A huge serpent curled across the face of a map of the known earth as it was millennia ago. Its jaws gaped wide and its fangs dripped poison as it pierced the body of a sacrifice heaped upon a pile of corpses. People cowered around it, some rapt in worship, others with faces contorted by terror. The precise chisel marks of cuneiform text ran around the tableau.
"The cuneiform words tell of an ancient evil."
A man stepped from the shadows in the corner of the room. He wore a black amaranth-piped cassock with pellegrina, a purple fascia and a gold pectoral cross. A scarlet skullcap topped his white close-cropped hair. His eyebrows were bushy above piercing blue eyes and he moved with the silent, lithe grace of an athlete.
"This is Cardinal Eric Krotalia," Marietti said. "He's an expert on eschatology, the End Times. I've been consulting with him about the tablet. He's one of our ARKANE advocates in Rome."
"Good to meet you, sir." Jake held out his hand and Krotalia shook it firmly.
Morgan thought Marietti's tone was just a little reserved, but if he trusted the Cardinal then she should respect his opinion. She nodded a greeting but kept her distance at the other end of the table. The man was just a little too good looking for a Cardinal, more like Sean Connery playing the aged hero than a crusty Vatican scholar.
Cardinal Krotalia walked up to the table and pointed at the carving.
"According to legend, the serpent will appear at the End of Days to devour the earth. The language is close to some of the biblical prophecies, although of course this tablet is much older than extant texts."
Marietti's dark eyes were haunted as he gazed at the marble. "It was smuggled out of Iraq as part of a network of archaeologists trying to save what's left of ancient civilizations. After the destruction of Palmyra, there are many who worry what else may be lost in the darkness of religious extremism."
Morgan reached out a finger to touch the edge of the slab. It was exciting to be this close to a piece of that iconic civilization and one of the reasons she loved working for ARKANE. "The mythology of the snake is in every culture," she said. "Why is this tablet so important?"
"Because of the timing." Marietti pointed to one part of the marble slab. "This references a particular pattern of rarely seen star constellations. We've cross-referenced with data from multiple sources and this particular stellar alignment only occurs once every four thousand years. This one coincides with a series of blood moon eclipses that intersect with Serpens, part of the constellation Ophiuchus, believed to represent Laocoon –"
"– who was killed by sea serpents," Morgan finished for him.
"Let me guess," Jake said, raising an eyebrow. "It's happening soon."
As he spoke, Martin Klein entered the lab. ARKANE's brilliant archivist bobbed up and down on the balls of his feet and brushed his ragged blonde hair back from his face. He pushed his wire-rimmed spectacles further up the ridge of his nose as he spoke with excitement, his words tumbling over one another.
"You're right, Jake! The alignment will happen in only ten days and we will be here to witness it." Martin grinned and clapped his hands a little, bouncing in place like a child delighted with a new toy. "What was prophesied so many thousand years ago will now come to pass."
Marietti held his hand up and Martin stopped bouncing, his smile fading at the Director's grim face. "While this is academically exciting on the one hand, it's also worrying. The text tells of a serpent who will destroy the earth, a warning of apocalypse at a time when too many already seek oblivion for humankind."
The Cardinal raised his hands as he intoned the words from the book of Revelation. "He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him … until the thousand years were ended."
"But the serpent is a representation of many things," Morgan said, resisting the pronunciation of doom. "Renewal in the shedding of skin, rebirth and eternity in the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. Why are you so worried about this in particular?"
Marietti sat down heavily on a chair by the marble tablet. The penumbra of the spotlight caught the side of his craggy face, deepening the shadows under his eyes. His skin was sallow, his shoulders drooped. Morgan saw a broken man on the edge of what he could handle. Marietti sighed and shook his head.
"I haven't told you what's been going on at ARKANE these last few months. The hierarchy and politics are generally kept hidden from field agents, so you can concentrate on your jobs. But you know ARKANE has teams all over the world, across many faiths and cultural divides. Up until recently, we all agreed that the supernatural world we face should be kept away from the public."
He shook his head and the Cardinal continued for him.
"Now it seems there are some who want to hasten the End Times, those who believe the Great Battle should come soon, and who believe that in trying to keep the supernatural away from the world, ARKANE somehow blocks the cosmic plan. We are concerned that this serpent will be used somehow to hasten the End of Days. When Director Marietti told me of the tablet, I knew we had to act."
"Sounds just as crazy as what we usually face out there," Jake said. "So what can we do?"
"The cuneiform script tells of a great p
it where the serpent lies bound," Marietti said. "An echo of the Revelation verse, so I give it some credence. I want you both to find the pit, because others search for it too."
Martin picked up his tablet computer, fingers flashing across the screen. "The group we suspect to be involved wears this symbol." He turned it round to show Morgan and Jake a tattoo of a coiled snake poised to strike, inked in emerald green. "They call themselves Roshites."
"From the Hebrew word rosh, meaning poison or venom," Morgan said, recalling the Hebrew. Although she hadn't lived in Israel for a number of years now, she had been brought up there by her father, murdered as one of the Remnant, and Hebrew was her second, fluent language. She felt a fleeting need to speak it again as the word formed on her lips. She thought differently when she spoke the ancient language, even dreamed different dreams.
"Indeed," Martin continued. "The Roshites are devotees of the Great Serpent, an ancient sect that can be tracked through history. The snake goddess sculptures at Knossos depict women holding writhing serpents aloft. Then there's the prophetess Pythia of the Delphic oracle in ancient Greece. Wadjet, the snake goddess of the uraeus crown in Egypt. And then of course, the biblical history –"
"The brazen serpent on Moses' staff," Morgan interrupted. "So that when anyone was bitten by a snake, they could look at the bronze idol and be healed. From the book of Numbers, chapter twenty-one."
Jake had been quiet but now he spoke. "And let's not forget this ancient serpent of Revelation, bound and cast into a pit, until the thousand years are ended. That seems to be the most important aspect right now."
Marietti put his hand on Jake's shoulder. "That's what I fear. It seems that the serpent was buried to keep it from the world, so at least our ancestors were able to vanquish it once before. But this prophecy suggests it is coming again."
"Perhaps it's just allegory," Morgan said. "The sin of the world, the knowledge of good and evil, that's what is destroying the earth. The Anthropocene era, as they call it now, demonstrates how man has brought this destruction upon himself."
Marietti looked at her, his eyes full of sorrow. "I wish it were so, Morgan. But you've seen the other side of allegory as an ARKANE agent. You know what we have to keep from those outside." He gestured down towards the vault beneath them. "You know the secrets we keep. You saw the demon in the bone church, the creatures from the Gates of Hell, the power of the Brahmastra. How can you now doubt that this could also be real?"
Morgan smiled. "You can't take the scientist out of the girl. But I take your point." She ran a finger over the curls of the snake, following its path across the slab. "This isn't uniform," she said. "Perhaps it's some kind of map?"
"My thoughts exactly." Martin tapped on the tablet again and spun it around. "This is a map of ancient Iraq and I've indicated the possible route of the snake based on the undulations on the slab. It heads directly east through Asia and out into the Western Pacific. Beyond the boundaries of what they would have known as the earth at the time, right out into the ocean."
"Whatever it was, it looks like they went to a lot of effort to get rid of it." Jake pinched the screen and zoomed in on the map. "That's near the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on earth."
"Not somewhere we can just rock up and search then," Morgan noted.
"There is something else." Marietti took the tablet from Martin and pulled up an image of the Ishtar Gate, a massive arch with bright blue bricks decorated with images of dragons and aurochs bulls. "The tablet was found at the back of where the Ishtar Gate was originally excavated. But there's information missing so perhaps there is a more detailed clue at the gate."
"Guess we're heading to Iraq then." Jake smiled. "It's been a while."
Actually, it's closer than that," Marietti said. "The Ishtar Gate is in Berlin at the Pergamon Museum."
"I'll make the arrangements." Martin tapped on his device. "By the time you've swapped your gear over from the India trip, you'll be good to go back out."
Morgan and Jake walked out into the corridor, heading for the weapons room. It was a short turnaround but they could kit up and be on their way again later tonight. Morgan loved the adrenalin of the mission and was keen to get going.
But there was one thing she had to know before they left. One thing that could put them both in grave danger.
3
Appalachian Mountains, Kentucky, USA. 10:12pm.
Lilith's eyes flicked open, suddenly wide with the knowledge of what was coming. As she gasped with the rush, she saw a man at the back of the church. His dark eyes were fixed on her. His close-cropped hair receded over a broad forehead, green eyes so like her own staring back at her. He wore a black shirt open two buttons and she could see a tattoo winding up his neck. The coils of a serpent in green and yellow.
He beckoned to her, then turned and walked out of the church.
Lilith felt the serpents shift in her hands. She had lost control and they would soon grow restless. As the faithful continued to sing, she bent and placed the three snakes back into their box at the feet of Pastor John.
Then she ran from the church out into the night.
The man leaned against the bonnet of a weathered SUV, his features shrouded in darkness. He was tall and powerfully muscled, with the scuffed boots and latent power of a ranger in the mountains.
"I know you felt it," the man said, his voice sensual, languid. "Do you want to know more?"
Lilith took a step towards him.
"Know more about what?" Her voice sounded fragile out here in the night, drowned out by the singing still audible in the church behind her.
The man went to the door of the car and opened it. The light from inside lit his face from beneath, his eyes dark hollows. He pulled his shirt away from his neck to reveal more of the snake tattoo. Lilith found herself walking towards him until she could see the detail of each scale. She stood so close she could feel the heat from his body and smell the musk from his skin. She wanted to lick his flesh with an outstretched tongue like the rattlers would.
"The time of the Great Serpent is close," he whispered. "Those of us who practice mithridatism know it."
Lilith inhaled sharply and stepped back. How did he know of her secret addiction? The practice involved injecting small amounts of venom regularly, in order to build up immunity to the poison.
That's how it started anyway.
Deep down, Lilith knew she chased the high she felt in the depths of poisoning, the hallucinations that took her out of her body into another realm. The small amounts she self-administered took the edge off the craving, but she always wanted more. The toxins were building up in her blood – they could kill her at any time.
But she couldn't stop.
"There's a venom you haven't tried," the man whispered. "One that will take you into the realms of what I know you crave." He bent close to her ear. His breath made her shiver. "Because I crave it too."
Lilith's heart hammered in her chest. He was hypnotic, dominant. She wanted what he offered, in so many ways.
"Who are you?"
"My chosen name is Samael." He smiled, and Lilith heard a dark humor under his intensity. "Call me Sam. And you, Lilith …" He stepped closer to her, cupping her chin and lifting her face. "You were born to be part of this."
His lips brushed hers with the gentlest of touches and something in her blood called to him. But the coils of the Great Serpent lay heavy in her mind.
"Part of what?" she said, putting her hand on his chest and pushing him back.
Sam stepped away and reached into the car. He pulled out a tablet computer and swiped the screen a few times. He brought up a picture of the night sky and zoomed into a star system.
"This is Serpens, part of the constellation of Ophiuchus. The picture was taken two nights ago." He was all business now, speaking with authority as he swiped the screen again to display an image of a black marble tablet inlaid with the coils of a great snake. "This is a tablet from ancient Babylon, a prophecy that tells of
the rising of the Great Serpent at the End Times." His eyes flashed with sudden anger. "That piece is lost to me now, but we have detailed photos. The pattern of the stars on the tablet match the constellation for the first time in four thousand years. My men are heading to Berlin to get the final piece of the puzzle, so we will soon know where the Great Serpent lies."
It sounded crazy and one part of Lilith, the scientist, wanted to mock his words. She would expect talk of the End Times and the Great Serpent from the fanatics inside the church. And yet, his words captivated her. Venom ran through her veins and his words made her blood sing.
"And then what?" she asked.
"Then we bring him back," Sam said, his eyes flashing with fire. "You felt the power of those tiny snakes here, so imagine how powerful the Serpent of Serpents will be. We will serve him and reign in a new world order. But I need your help."
The thought of this powerful man needing her brought a smile to Lilith's lips.
"Why? What can I do that you can't?"
Sam sighed and shook his head. Lilith sensed a form of jealousy running beneath. "There is no other who can handle the venom levels you have already survived. Believe me, we've tried a number of subjects and there's no time to waste anymore." Lilith fleetingly wondered who those subjects had been, and whether they had died in the spasms of venom poisoning.
"I've even tried myself, but you … you're the only one who can reach him." Sam's voice was flattering, even respectful as he continued. "I know you must have heard him in your dreams and in your venom trance. Only you can find him now. Come with me, please. Help me bring him back."
Sam reached into the car and pulled out a vacuum flask. He unscrewed the lid and a plume of dry ice wafted into the air with a puff of exhalation. He pulled out a tiny vial.
"If you come with me, this is yours."
Lilith reached out a hand for it, but Sam held it out of her reach.
"What is it?"
"Inland taipan."